Ask a winner updates: Answers

Not too long ago we asked our readers what they would like to hear about from the PUSH N900 winners and their hacks. We got some silly questions, and some serious, we asked both and now the PUSH teams have answered.

Todays team interview is KAPing with the N900. They’re N900 hack is the high flying Kite Aerial Photography. Check out what they have to say after the break. And be sure to keep up on their blog – they’ve released their first test video just a few days ago.

>Thank you for taking the time to answer some questions for HackaDay. We love when a hacker is willing to share their work with us.

Hi there, I’m [Ricardo Mendonça Ferreira], from the “KAPing with the N900″
project.

First of all, I’m a big fan of Hack-a-Day (even if I was not able to
read it for quite some time), so I’m happy to answer your questions.

>How did you and your team get together? Any fun backstory you care to share?

My other teammate is my wife. Lot’s of fun stories, but none related to
this project (yet). :)

Hmm… on second thought, here’s one: my wife’s stepfather was helping
us out when we were filming for the project. I asked him to assemble our
largest kite (a Maxi-Dopero, a bit larger than 4m x 2m) in the
background while I was giving an interview. We couldn’t stop laughing
when we saw the footage: he appeared scratching his had all the time, as
if he had no idea of what he was doing! Because, in fact, he didn’t! :D

>Have you and your team worked on any other projects? Cellular related projects? N900 projects?

We have never worked on anything like this before. We never had or used
an N900 or Arduino before this project.

>What was your main inspiration for your team’s project?

I’ve been practicing KAP (Kite Aerial Photography) since 2005, and I
always wanted a powerful yet simple to use KAP controller, so my
inspiration was my necessity. I already had planned to use an N900 for
this even before the launch of the Push N900 project. When I found out
about it, I did a bit of research and just submitted our project.

>How do you think people will react when you finish/release?

I hope more people will get to know about KAP, the N900, and use our
software and guidelines to develop their own KAP systems.

>Do you have any future plans with your team? Continued N900 development? Update your current projects?

This project is addictive! :) So the answer is yes, I plan to keep
updating my system and also develop other hardware and software
solutions for the N900.

>What do you think of the other winners?

They all have great and interesting projects, each one tackling
different problems and facing different challenges. I’m looking forward
to meet them and their creations in London!

>Questions from our commentators.
>
>What are you thoughts on Arduino? Do you intend to use one in your project?

I never used one before, but decided to use an Arduino Duemilanove after
reading the “PUSH N900 Hacker’s guide”. It will control two servo motors
with commands received from the N900 via Bluetooth.

>How is working with the N900 hardware and software?

Awesome! It’s like programming a desktop system. Since I’m a software
engineer with Unix experience, I felt at home with the device right from
the start.

>What do you think about the movement of cell phones towards open source software, such as the Maemo? Do you plan to, or have you ever tried Android?

I’m a big fan of both Nokia and Google for this. You can feel you really
“own” your device if it has one of these systems.

I always admired both Maemo and Android, but when I was looking for my
next gadget, I elected the N900 because Maemo seemed more mature and
with much better support for applications written in C / compiled into
native code. Of course, this opens more opportunities for processor
intensive applications than Android’s Dalvik Java virtual machine.

(Obs.: I know you can write native code for the Android, but AFAIK, it’s
not as simple as is on the Maemo, which supports it on the official SDK.)

>(If you use a secondary power source, example – to run motors) What kind of battery life is expected for your project?

This will depend *a lot* on the settings and how the system is used, but
my guess is that both motors and phone batteries will be good for
sessions longer than an hour. This is usually more than sufficient for a
good KAP session.

>Can we get a list of what you’re using in your project? (example – bluetooth sets, motors, dedicated sensors, etc)

Here’s my ingredients list:
– two N900 devices
– one Arduino Duemilanove
– one BlueSMiRF Gold Bluetooth modem
– two servo motors
– one Picavet suspension
– one rig to hold the motors and one N900
– one Rokkaku kite
– one pair of gloves
– one winder
– a lot of line

>And yes, we actually had a reader (Joe) ask the following (feel free to omit)
>How often do you change your underwear?

Please see my answer below. Should take just a couple of seconds for
some people do understand what this really is. ;)